May 27, 2014

Looking around the internet, I can’t help but observe that the very same people that are screaming for better mental health screening and more proactive response from law enforcement today are the ones that were cutting checks to the ACLU to prevent stigmatization and loss of freedom because of ableist mental health discrimination last week.

Make up your ****ing mind, ya buncha ****ing hypocrites. Do you want the Department of Precrime dragging people off or not?

The other problem with crazy is that we've spent a couple generations celebrating it, treating it as if insanity comes with some sort of insight into reality, rather than being a disconnect from reality.

I've always held that things like psychotics murdering people are just "the cost of living in the universe" - sort of like being struck by lightning. Life is risk, and ultimately is always fatal, and to try to "fix" that simple fact is ultimately not only doomed to failure, but generally the solution is worse than the problem it's supposed to solve.

Lighten involuntary committment rules? Sure. Bring back a solid mental hospital infrastructure? Go for it. We might stop one in ten of these sorts of events... but we'll never stop them all, at least not for the foreseeable future until we can actually cure crazy. We're not even remotely close to that yet.

And hey, even if we do... one can still get smashed by an asteroid. The universe is dangerous, and it doesn't care. Deal with it.

Take gun-free zone. Add a criminally insane person. You see the results. The criminally insane are always with us and can't be reliably identified in advance. So how about getting rid of the gun-free zones.

I am in favor of making it easier to involuntarily commit people, particularly those who are so mentally ill they are unemployable and end up homeless.

I think its highly unlikely that making it easier to commit people would have helped much with the recent shooter under any reasonable system of involuntary commitment. Maybe it would have made it harder, but by no means impossible, for him to get guns. Even then he still stabbed three people to death and used a car as a weapon.

From what I have read this person had no history of hurting himself or others and I don't think he had been arrested before (I could be wrong about this, but it was never mentioned in any articles I have read). He didn't hear voices, hallucinate, or lose control of himself. It sounds like he could do OK in a situation like school or work and could communicate well when he needed to. So not a good case for involuntary commitment before the fact despite the fact that he ended up as a sociopath and mass murderer.

No hypocrisy here, Tam. I've been consistent, and never gave a dime to the ACLU for anything. There was a time, which you are probably too young to remember, when nut cases with violent tendencies were locked up. Was there abuse? Yes. Was it rampant? No. Was there potential for abuse? Hell yes. There is potential for abuse in everything gubmint does. That is why the Founders wanted power concentrated mostly at the local and state level - if a person doesn't like their state, they can either fight it or pick up and move.

Yes, a free society entails risk, and I am willing to face that risk. What I am not happy about facing are sick puppies w guns. If a nut bag is seeing a shrink, and that shrink knows the nut bag is a risk to feed his meds to the cat and writes violent diatribes in the inevitable journal shrinks want a patient to keep, then that shrink has a responsibility to see that said nut bag does not legally acquire firearms, and the law should allow the shrink to do that, with multiple concurring opinions from other shrinks.

Trust me on this. If they ever pass any sort of mandatory commitment law. The Dems will try and put all of their political rivals in the nut house. We can already see how they're trying to label veterans as "too crazy" to have guns. We can also see how Democratic DA's are constantly hitting Republicans with bogus charges and investigations. In the future, Republicans would spend all their time fighting commitment proceedings brought by some group of Leftards.

They will not even have to pass mandatory commitment laws. The regulatory and executive side will just "Operation Choke Point" the people and no laws will be necessary. The Congress has been highly negligent in allowing the executive branch broad leeway in interpreting and enforcing laws and Obama has gone farther than any president. They will have to write laws in a way that assumes the executive will try to twist meanings and manipulate enforcement. A good start would bethe elimination of departments wholesale and rescinding previous authorizations.

There is a difference between people who are temperamentally different from the majority of the population, intraverts mostly as that is a sizable minority that runs across humanity, the people better left to themselves who and get exhausted dealing with groups of their fellow man. Today this is misdiagnosed as ADD or ADHD: self-motivating individuals who do on their own and are bored with the stultifying strictures of classrooms. We seek to medicate the impossible to change and call this 'progress'.

Those who are mentally ill and who have problems interfacing with life also have problems getting treatment as those with severe problems get the most attention. Again these individuals seek forms of medication some of which work and others that just mask underlying problems, meaning that both are seen as 'working' while only a part of that group actually has a long-term fix. When the problems overcome the drugs we get the reaction of 'no one saw this coming' and yet it was through the idea that these treatments offer a cure to all with conditions that is the problem.

After that comes the people disconnected with reality, those who have little if any contact with rational thought or who become so obsessed with certain ideas about how the universe should work that they react against it when it does not work that way. A number of these people do have some interface with reality, are not idiots and otherwise can keep a semi-coherent front in place so as to avoid medical care and help. As they also see that treatment does not cure all, and leaves some with problems that get worse with time, they do what they can to consider treatment as an additional problem. Without skills to methodically take medicine and structure their lives, they go on and off those medications when they do seek help.

After that there are those who just want to see the world burn.

There is no help for them to get a 'normal' life as they will do anything, mask anything they say or do, and otherwise try to appear 'normal' when authorities are around and then let that mask slip as it is just a mask to avoid detection.

Heaven help the very few who can hear voices in their head and just ignore them to lead a regular and good life. Those with the temperament to actually go their own way show an ability to deal with their problems and not seek treatment because what they are doing works for them. And they dare not speak of it because those trying to 'do good' will seek to have them tested and put under medication which is not necessary and may even do harm to their mental state.

There can be no dept. of 'pre-crime' under these conditions as the number of individual types goes far beyond what we can handle or what we can even recognize. For those that are a danger to others, who seek deranged goals via violent means and SAY SO, these need help and society is at a danger from them. To those seeking help a 'one size fits all, fits none well solution' is a failure to some, and we must come to terms with this and find better ways to help those that cannot be treated properly by modern medicine. As for putting someone away without their consent, depriving them of their liberty and freedom, that is not a matter for 'experts' but a jury trial by their peers as such a weighty decision can not be made by two or three 'experts' but must be done by a representative section of society to say if the individual is or is not a danger to them. That will let slip by some who want to see the world burn, true, there is no stopping them by any means at our disposal. Thus we are to be armed so as to protect ourselves from man who determines the best way to go savage is to lie about it and then seek to inflict savagery upon us all to his ends which our destruction. No system can stop man once civilized from turning to savagery, and it is our duty to have arms to defend ourselves from such as that is the positive liberty of warfare: self-defense and protection against savage man visiting Private War amongst us.

As a psychologist who has worked with men and boys for over 20 years, I can say that our society is devoid of programs and help for mental health issues for men or we try to give help that is not helpful.

Yup, treating men like women in the field of psychiatry, psychoanalysis, psychology etc. is probably not a wise move.

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